Home / About

About this site

Titan 2100 is a speculative design, built as a guided real-time tour of the Saturn system. The physics is real, the numbers come from the project's registers, and the 2100 history is fiction.

The one note out of universe

Everything else on this site is written as if the Saturn settlement existed in 2100. That is the design brief. It makes the engineering concrete: once a fusion ship is parked at the Gateway, you can ask what it weighs, what it burns and where the heat goes. The real science runs underneath. Chosen values are marked as chosen, capabilities beyond today are marked as challenges, and the story of how the settlement came to be is invented.

Titan 2100 is the sequel to Concordia 2045, a space habitat at Earth-Moon L5. The settlers who built Concordia's zero-g yard also built the nuclear-thermal shuttles that open the Saturn system, and their design language carries over.

Where it stands

This is a draft. It is honest about that.

• What runs. The nine-chapter tour (about 13 minutes), the Saturn-system atlas on the real positions for 1 July 2100, a camera director that swings round a vehicle when its engine lights, 6 engine looks, two deep zooms (fusion and methane combustion), a flyable Titan rotorcraft in free exploration, and 10 inspect points at Kraken Shore.
• What is a stand-in. Every vehicle and building is a labelled proxy shape built from boxes and cylinders. They exist to test cameras, scale and flow. Detailed Blender models come after each layout is signed off.
• What is missing. There is no sound or music in the app yet. The explainers are not yet linked from inside the experience, and only two of the eight vehicles have a deep zoom.
• Where the numbers stand. Every number carries a basis tag. Values that depend on technology nobody has built are tagged challenge, and chosen values are tagged design. Nothing is presented as measured when it is not.

The model in numbers

Counted when this site was built.

The simulation runs on three.js with a WebGPU renderer and falls back to WebGL2. The positions of Saturn's moons, the Earth and the Sun come from NASA JPL Horizons state vectors for 1 July 2100. Vehicle numbers are computed by scripts from stated inputs, and the vehicle pages here read the same data file the simulation does.

How it stays fast in a browser

This section is out of universe. The figures were measured on the development desktop (an RTX 3060) in October 2026, at 1920 by 1080 with vsync off.

• Frame time. Across 13 measured targets (every chapter, both engine-ignition swings and both deep zooms), the median frame takes 2.6 to 3.1 ms, and the graphics card spends at most 2.4 ms of that. The slowest 5% of frames stay under 7.7 ms (the atlas, which projects labels each frame).
• Engine effects in a separate pass. Exhaust particles and glow render at half resolution on their own layer and are composited into the final image, so a big plume costs a fraction of a full-resolution pass.
• Particles on the graphics card. Plume and plasma particles are updated by compute shaders, not by JavaScript.
• Time is a function. The tour runs off one virtual clock, so a skipped frame never drifts a camera move, and the same code renders deterministic frames for review clips.
• Quiet interface. The on-screen text writes to the page only when a value changes. That alone cut the worst frames in the journey from 11 to 16 ms down to 3 to 4 ms.

Every check runs on a real graphics card; the test harness refuses software rendering.

What is real and what is styled

The Saturn system is drawn from real positions. Where looks or playability beat accuracy, this is the list.

• Space is compressed in the atlas. Moons are drawn larger than true size so you can find them. The view says so, and a toggle shows true sizes.
• Vehicles and buildings are proxies. Their dimensions come from the vehicle budgets, not from final designs.
• Engine colours start from physics and are then boosted. A methane flame glows from CH and C₂ emission, a nuclear-thermal exhaust is mostly invisible, and an ion beam is faint. The tour shows each brighter than a camera would see it so you can follow the flow. Every boost is recorded as styled.
• Engine light is relative. The glow an ignition throws on the hull is tuned for the picture, not computed from the engine's radiated power.
• Deep zooms are diagrams. Nuclei and molecules are drawn as spheres with the scale marked on screen. They are illustrative, not depictions.
• Story time is compressed. A crossing that takes the Long Passage about a year plays in seconds, and the Titan ascent is shown at a pace you can watch.
• The shoreline is reconstructed. Radar measured the depth of Moray Sinus, but the relief of the headland at Kraken Shore is below the resolution of any map, so the land is a labelled reconstruction.
• Saturn and its rings are placeholders. The planet and rings are procedural materials until the planetary textures are in.
• Flight is simplified. The rotorcraft uses a momentum-theory power model and simplified handling.

What the basis tags mean

Numbers and claims across the site carry a small tag that says what kind of claim they are. They do not hedge the text. They say where each claim comes from, so you can tell a measurement from a design choice. Turn them off with "Show basis" at the top of any page.

Author

Titan 2100 is designed and built by David Veksler, who also built Concordia 2045.

Credits and licences

The simulation uses three.js. Sound effects and music are planned to be generated locally with open-licence models. Orbital positions are from NASA JPL Horizons, and planetary constants are from NASA and JPL fact sheets and the published papers cited on each explainer. Imagery and models used in the experience carry their own licences.